Hello, friend!

Thanks for clicking in. And thanks to all of you who came out Monday night to see Mike and Annalee chat about How to Die (and other stories). Room was packed. Everyone cried, and also laughed. And most importantly, they bought a wide variety of books and supported one of our favorite local indie bookstores.

Get a handle on your stakes

"I have two kinds of problems: the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent". —Dr J. Roscoe Miller, president of Northwestern University quoted by Dwight D. Eisenhower

This quote is the foundation of the popular productivity tool The Eisenhower Matrix (worst reboot). In the current era, the difference between urgency and importance has totally collapsed — through actual events and interface conventions — mixed up in a pungent stew of outrage and fear and unceasing notifications.

I don't have to tell you how hard it is to triage incoming bids for attention. So many marketing emails, fundraising texts, and social posts carry a dire warning about the risk of failing to act. Don’t forget for a second that the clock is ticking and the stakes are high!

If you're trying to communicate anything to anyone, especially information related to an ongoing situation, you need to be so careful about how you manage urgency. The worst thing you can do is make your audience more anxious, even and especially if you are trying to motivate them to take action with wide-reaching implications. They will learn to avoid you.

Confusing alarm with action is such a common impulse. We talk about it all the time at Mule. We even have a maxim: "Don't adopt a freakout." Emotional energy catches fast. If you're in the business of solving problems, a crisis will pop up. The first job is to figure out the scope and scale of the event before deciding what to do about it (sometimes just acknowledge and move on!). It's too easy to amplify a worry until everyone is reflecting each other’s reactions and making no progress on the real problem. The art is in dispersing ambient anxiety without dismissing anyone’s concern. Go back and listen to all the Artemis II mission chatter.

One of the promises of the practice of design is that it offers a means to improve systems by imagining what doesn't exist, but could, and should, and creating a plan to bring it to be.

Unfortunately, designers and activists and others who want to bring about meaningful positive change are often overly optimistic and unprepared for the resistance they meet. Sure, we all expect pushback from the people who are obviously benefitting from the current broken system, but what about those who would be much better off in a new arrangement?

People tend to resist significant change to the way things are, and they are often motivated to defend it, even when it's bad for them as individuals or members of classes. This tendency is illustrated by K.C. Green and explained in part by System Justification Theory.

“To truly challenge the status quo, to engage in sustained and profound forms of protest, one must be willing and able to tolerate a great deal of uncertainty, potential threats to one’s safety and security, and the risk of being alienated or cut off from friends, family members, and others in mainstream society.” (A quarter century of system justification theory: Questions, answers, criticisms, and societal applications, John T. Jost, 2018 PDF)

Hence, justifying the existing system can offer psychological benefits of reducing uncertainty and ambiguity, decreasing perceived threats, and increasing a sense of belonging. This is a long-winded way of invoking "the devil you know." Not everyone will defend the way things are to avoid taking action, but many will be tempted to, especially those who fear losing their community or identity.

"People are more accepting of unwelcome social and political outcomes – such as restrictions on their freedoms and various forms of disadvantageous inequality – when these are perceived as inevitable or inescapable"

Once you start looking, you’ll start noticing how many messages that are supposed to inspire action and system change do the opposite because they emphasize:

• Existential or other threats

• Individual, instead of collective, action

• Inevitability of consequences and low likelihood of success

• Immediacy over importance and context

Even supporters can only take so much from all directions before they tune out and rationalize inaction.

It’s essential to be factual, while meeting people where they are (first, understand where they are), and to put genuinely urgent action in the larger context. To make it easier to do the right thing, you have to know what actually makes it hard, while not letting anyone off the hook.

On the topic of stakes in fiction writing, Charlie Jane Anders would like to throw them in the sea …sorry, into a volcano.

We need places

History professor and author Seth Cotlar, posted a link to an article reporting on a study of how the disappearance of the ‘tabac’ (like a British pub) fueled the rise of the far right in France.

The need to preserve and grow third spaces is a theme that’s only getting louder. “AI” isn’t going to save Bumble.

What Zooms may come

May 28 - Let’s Do Design Research Right!

You have no excuse for not talking to people (especially the people in your organization). Bad things happen when you avoid talking to people. In just three hours you’ll be able to overcome every objection to learning about the real world, including the secret ones you carry in your own heart. Tell your boss a large language model is involved.

May 29 - Mike Monteiro’s Virtual Book Tour

Mike sits down one-on-one with special guest, novelist Arjun Basu, to discuss Mike’s new book, How to Die (and other stories).